4 ms·

Emacs was one of my first email clients. It was great when email was largely plain text, and IMAP was still rare. Both MH and Gnus were fantastic. HTML email ki

Emacs was one of my first email clients. It was great when email was largely plain text, and IMAP was still rare. Both MH and Gnus were fantastic. HTML email killed Emacs as a mail client for me.

jaaron 6y ago
Yes. I really miss it, but I'm just not sure how practical it is anymore.
- mycpuorg 6y ago
  Hi, author of the blog here. It is not everything, but if you were optimizing for certain things like less distraction, fewer "fire fighting threads", detailed thoughts shared via email then Emacs is great. I have learnt to live in plain text for a while now and it is great because a lot the cases don't really require you to respond in html. If you are doing it often, it's probably worth attaching a 2-pager. But if you are in a, say consultant role, where quicker email responses to clients, html support, MS Word like highlighting, then this is not it.
  - jaaron 6y ago
    I'm honestly envious and this has me thinking about how I can move some of my workflow back into emacs because I do think it was more sane. Definitely allowed for more deep work. I know, for some folks not already familiar with emacs that can sound crazy, but I've already invested in the learning curve.
    - mycpuorg 6y ago
      True. I think the workflow will continue to be fragmented even with richer email content.
- truncate 6y ago
  Speaking of practical, I really like GMail interface. Their system of tagging over folder really work well for me (I think there are CLI alternatives to do so). But more recently, I'm pretty addicted to using the AI suggestions that GMail gives when composing an email.
girzel 6y ago
Emacs does have its own renderer, eww, that can be used to do simple HTML rendering of emails. If I'm sent something really gruesome, "K H" will send it to Firefox to display. In my experience, the mails that refuse to display anything but "please view this message in your browser" are never mails I actually want to look at. I'm not arguing that you have to be willing to put up with some friction! But to me it's not that bad. [edit: typo]
- ylee 6y ago
  I do the same, with VM; 25 years and counting. My Emacs doesn't have EWW but W3M is sufficient for almost all HTML messages; for me shift-H is the keybinding that sends a message to the browser should I want to view it that way. I love being able to write my own Elisp code to have VM work exactly the way I want it.
- jacobsenscott 6y ago
  I use mu4e and a lot of what the author says is spot on. Searching email with mu is super fantastic for example. Viewing html email in emacs is usually pretty easy. The html2text is usually good enough. The real problem is sending email. Plain text email looks like trash in any modern mail reader. Any recipient will wonder why your email is broken. On a desktop client the lines will be way too short. On a phone, too long. Format flowed or whatever doesn't solve it. The lines just need to be html paragraphs. I saw a blog post about an mu4e plugin that would allow you to write your email in markdown, and it will htmlify it for you. That would be a big help, assuming you can preview before sending. It is easy to make markdown errors without a preview.
  - ylee 6y ago
    >The real problem is sending email. Plain text email looks like trash in any modern mail reader. Any recipient will wonder why your email is broken. On a desktop client the lines will be way too short. On a phone, too long. I disagree on "too short" lines being a problem for desktop, but in any case, it is quite possible to send plaintext mail without 70-column line breaks. How I do so in VM in Emacs: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2020-05/msg00000.html https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2020-05/... I've had to stop 25 years of muscle memory of M-q while writing a message, but otherwise the solution seems quite satisfactory.
nanna 6y ago
I think we need to be clear, there's two issues here. 1. Receiving html emails in emacs 2. Sending plain-text emails in emacs I personally do not find 1. to be a problem at all. If the html gets garbled in my automatic html2text conversion (I use html2markdown) then opening it up in Firefox is just a keypress away. Easy. I agree that 2. is an issue, however in the rare occasions that I do need to write an html email, I just open up Outlook or Gmail or whatever. We don't have to be Richard Stallman about this. You can use another client when you need to. For me, 99% of the time emacs/mu4e is absolutely adequate, and better than the Outlooks/Gmails for a host of reasons. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Emacs was one of my first email clients. It was great when email was largely plain text, and IMAP was still rare. Both MH and Gnus were fantastic. HTML email killed Emacs as a mail client for me.

jaaron 6y ago

Yes. I really miss it, but I'm just not sure how practical it is anymore.

mycpuorg 6y ago
Hi, author of the blog here. It is not everything, but if you were optimizing for certain things like less distraction, fewer "fire fighting threads", detailed thoughts shared via email then Emacs is great. I have learnt to live in plain text for a while now and it is great because a lot the cases don't really require you to respond in html. If you are doing it often, it's probably worth attaching a 2-pager. But if you are in a, say consultant role, where quicker email responses to clients, html support, MS Word like highlighting, then this is not it.
- jaaron 6y ago
  I'm honestly envious and this has me thinking about how I can move some of my workflow back into emacs because I do think it was more sane. Definitely allowed for more deep work. I know, for some folks not already familiar with emacs that can sound crazy, but I've already invested in the learning curve.
  - mycpuorg 6y ago
    True. I think the workflow will continue to be fragmented even with richer email content.
truncate 6y ago
Speaking of practical, I really like GMail interface. Their system of tagging over folder really work well for me (I think there are CLI alternatives to do so). But more recently, I'm pretty addicted to using the AI suggestions that GMail gives when composing an email.

girzel 6y ago

Emacs does have its own renderer, eww, that can be used to do simple HTML rendering of emails. If I'm sent something really gruesome, "K H" will send it to Firefox to display. In my experience, the mails that refuse to display anything but "please view this message in your browser" are never mails I actually want to look at. I'm not arguing that you have to be willing to put up with some friction! But to me it's not that bad. [edit: typo]

ylee 6y ago
I do the same, with VM; 25 years and counting. My Emacs doesn't have EWW but W3M is sufficient for almost all HTML messages; for me shift-H is the keybinding that sends a message to the browser should I want to view it that way. I love being able to write my own Elisp code to have VM work exactly the way I want it.
jacobsenscott 6y ago
I use mu4e and a lot of what the author says is spot on. Searching email with mu is super fantastic for example. Viewing html email in emacs is usually pretty easy. The html2text is usually good enough. The real problem is sending email. Plain text email looks like trash in any modern mail reader. Any recipient will wonder why your email is broken. On a desktop client the lines will be way too short. On a phone, too long. Format flowed or whatever doesn't solve it. The lines just need to be html paragraphs. I saw a blog post about an mu4e plugin that would allow you to write your email in markdown, and it will htmlify it for you. That would be a big help, assuming you can preview before sending. It is easy to make markdown errors without a preview.
- ylee 6y ago
  >The real problem is sending email. Plain text email looks like trash in any modern mail reader. Any recipient will wonder why your email is broken. On a desktop client the lines will be way too short. On a phone, too long. I disagree on "too short" lines being a problem for desktop, but in any case, it is quite possible to send plaintext mail without 70-column line breaks. How I do so in VM in Emacs: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2020-05/msg00000.html https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/viewmail-info/2020-05/... I've had to stop 25 years of muscle memory of M-q while writing a message, but otherwise the solution seems quite satisfactory.

nanna 6y ago

I think we need to be clear, there's two issues here. 1. Receiving html emails in emacs 2. Sending plain-text emails in emacs I personally do not find 1. to be a problem at all. If the html gets garbled in my automatic html2text conversion (I use html2markdown) then opening it up in Firefox is just a keypress away. Easy. I agree that 2. is an issue, however in the rare occasions that I do need to write an html email, I just open up Outlook or Gmail or whatever. We don't have to be Richard Stallman about this. You can use another client when you need to. For me, 99% of the time emacs/mu4e is absolutely adequate, and better than the Outlooks/Gmails for a host of reasons. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.